(ANSA) - ZAGREB, JANUARY 31 - About seventy musical and artistic events tomorrow in Rijeka (Rijeka in Croatian) will start the events of the European Capital of Culture, a title that the Adriatic city holds this year along with Galway in Ireland. It is the first time that a city in Croatia, which joined the EU in 2013, becomes the European capital of culture.

Furthermore, Croatia holds the EU Council's six-month rotating presidency for the first time.

Events, exhibitions, and artistic performances will take place tomorrow from early morning on all the central squares in Rijeka. The highlight of the program is expected in the early evening in the city harbor with a great musical and theatrical event, "Industrial opera", dedicated to the complex historical identity of Rijeka. The institutional part of the program will be attended by almost all the ministers of culture of the EU countries and those of the Balkan countries and will be held in the municipal theater.

The program for the whole 2020 provides for more than six hundred cultural and artistic events, including some exhibitions focusing on the complex history of Rijeka which in the twentieth century changed state membership five times. The city until 1918 was the main Hungarian port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then went through some convulsive years as a city-state in the Italian Carnaro Regency, proclaimed by Gabriele D'Annunzio, and then Rijeka (Fiume) was assigned to the Kingdom of Italy in 1922. In 1945, with the defeat of Nazi-fascism in Europe, the town became part of socialist Yugoslavia led by Marshal Josip Broz Tito and in 1990 of independent Croatia, after the dissolution of the Yugoslav federation. (ANSA).